“Any form of media is an opportunity to be a mirror and reflection of what we are experiencing more in the details of our life. What makes it fun and unique in a lot of ways is how that journey is changing just by the mere fact of the current time.” -Mara Brock Akil
College: the hub of self-discovery and existential crises; the place where mistakes are made, and lessons are learned; the place of birth of one’s true life purpose. This description of the vicissitudes of higher education was realized for showrunner, Mara Brock Akil, in 1992 on the Northwestern University campus. It was at this time that she opened her eyes to the world of television and storytelling. Akil set out not only tell the stories of individuals who are not typically at the forefront of television representation, but also to rewrite the stereotypical narrative of these types of characters. In a recent interview with The Culture magazine, Akil discussed her goal ever since she chose to be a screenwriter in college. She stated, “I didn’t see myself [on television] and that is more damaging: to be invisible to society.” As evidence of her award-winning show, Girlfriends, Akil chooses to utilize her platform to both normalize and emblazon the experiences of minorities in media. She has thus employed this passion in a way that has forever left her footprint in the sands of the sitcom genre, creating a mirror through her positive reflection of the complexities and social issues that surround the black community.
Mara Brock Akil surprisingly began her early television career as an actress. After landing a very small speaking role in director Alek Keshishian’s film entitled With Honors, she was strongly convinced that she had a passion for film and television. Upon moving to Los Angeles after graduating from Northwestern University and getting her first taste of the industry, Akil commenced her search for a job with the help of fellow Northwestern alumni and up and coming filmmaker, Jerry Zeismer. After receiving many rejections and closed doors, Akil finally got her big break when she was offered a job as a production assistant, and one year later, as a writer trainee on the FOX network show, South Central. This was a half hour long American comedy-drama series about a working-class, African American family residing in South Central, Los Angeles that aired in 1994. Although South Central was cancelled after the first ten episodes, signifying the end of Akil’s time working on this particular project, the closing of this chapter did not imply an end to Akil’s writing career. South Central’s executive producer, Ralph Farquhar appreciated Akil’s work ethic and creative vision while working on the show, and offered her a job as a writer on the United Paramount Network’s (UPN) hit situation comedy show entitled Moesha, which was centered around the life of an African American teenaged girl. It was during Akil’s time working on this show that she gained experience and notoriety while broadening her horizon further than just writing. For instance, Akil won a Sexual Health in Entertainment award (SHINE) for an episode of Moesha that she produced entitled, “Birth Control,” which explored various dynamics and controversial questions surrounding teen sexuality. Thus, we see the birth of Akil’s career and writing style as it was shaped by the exploration of prevalent social issues regarding the African-American experience through sitcom television. After just four seasons working on Moesha, Akil officially earned her title as a producer/showrunner. This promotion gave her the green light to simultaneously work as a supervising producer for WB network’s sitcom, The Jamie Foxx Show, starring Jamie Foxx.
It was now 1999 and Akil had the attention of many prominent UPN network executives at just twenty-nine years old. Little did she know that this was going to be the year that would change her career forever. When network executives approached Akil with an opportunity to create her own half-hour sitcom about African-American women, she jumped at this once-in-a-lifetime offer that would make her the youngest black woman producer in Hollywood, without any trepidation. Thus, the infamous series, Girlfriends was born. Girlfriends made its television debut on the UPN network in 2000. Akil combined her prior experience with sitcoms and her passion to accurately portray the experience of the black community to culminate Girlfriends into a provocative comedy series that served as a medium for showcasing the multiplicities of African American women by not only portraying how their identity shaped the social issues they encountered, but also their responses to those issues. It was this series that propelled Akil’s career to even more new and exciting heights, giving her the platform to continue to break barriers and shatter glass ceilings.
Over the course of Akil’s career, she has remained consistent in the television industry. Specifically all of the shows that Akil has worked on including Girlfriends, The Game, Love Is, and Being Mary Jane have all aired on either The CW Television Network, UPN, BET and/or OWN. These are all prominent television networks that Akil has worked with throughout the majority of her career, making her a heavily television network based writer. However, all seasons of Girlfriends can be streamed via the streaming-video component of Amazon Prime entitled Amazon Prime Video. Similarly, episodes of The Game can be found on Hulu and all seasons of Being Mary Jane can be streamed via Netflix or Vudu. Therefore, Akil has established the particular windowing strategy of her shows as seamlessly moving from network to streaming services once they have transitioned off the air.
As far as Akil’s shift between film and television, she mostly remains within the realm of TV. She has only ventured outside of the television world and into the world of film once, for a movie entitled, “Sparkle.” This film was a remake of the original movie about a rising female singing group in Harlem. Mara Brock Akil’s husband and business partner, director Salim Akil, was originally offered the movie remake in 2011. In a 2012 interview with the Los Angeles Times, the Akil’s expressed their nostalgic admiration for the original “Sparkle,” but also expressed their pressing concerns and hesitation toward taking on this newly presented responsibility. At the time, the two were in the midst of creating their joint television empire as they were both breaking records with their show The Game and in the process of negotiating deals with BET to introduce the network to “the scripted series arena” (“Los Angeles Times”). However, Mara Brock Akil began to look at this project from a new perspective. She saw an opportunity to alter the dynamics of the original film through women empowerment. The article states that her vision was to change the location of the film from 1958 Harlem to 1968 Detroit and to reverse the victimization of the women that was prominent in the original film. From this brainstorming, the Akils’ Sparkle remake became the quintessential representation of what they consider as their brand: “using black stories and characters to illustrate universal truths about the American dream.”
During Mara Brock Akil’s time working with UPN on Girlfriends, the network was known for its tradition of being “the home of over 10 concurrently running Black sitcoms” from 1995 to 2006 according to a 2015 IndieWire article. With its signature display of nuclear black families and multidimensional black characters, UPN had certainly solidified its “brand.” In chapter one entitled “The Principles of Media Distribution” in Kirkpatrick’s book, Introduction to Media Distribution: Film, Television, and New Media, he discusses how “every well-established distribution company has a clear and identifiable ‘brand’.” He then expands this idea by claiming that maintaining this identifiable brand is a major asset in any marketplace. Kirkpatrick encapsulates how important brand preservation is in assuring a paying customer that they will receive what they’re paying for. Being consistent in the delivery of specific types of content keeps revenue flowing. Thus, the opposite is also true. When applying this precept to Akil’s career, it is evident that when the UPN executives approached her with an opportunity to create a sitcom about African-American women, they had the sole intention of expanding through creating more brand-specific content. Since UPN had already established a long list of black sitcoms (including Moesha, All of Us, and One on One) that daringly utilized the authentic experiences of black people as proxy for the basis of all of their shows, it was up to Akil to mold this unprecedented idea for a series about black women around this brand.
Along with aligning her television shows with the network’s brand, Akil was also tasked with the responsibility of incorporating her own brand by including signature themes that represent her personal career passions and her previous work. Akil is known for writing stories about characters through the lens of dominant African-American perspectives. Collectively, her work has included themes revolving around the celebration of black love and/or black success, or the struggles and controversial issues that play a great role in shaping the overall black experience. Along with her heavy emphasis on race, Akil also weaves gender into the seams of her show’s reflection of the black experience, as all of Akil’s shows are structured around a strong female lead(s). Thus, it is evident that Akil chooses to appeal to niche segments of viewers instead of creating content that is made for the enjoyment of a universal market. With this in mind, examining the class reading entitled, “The American Television Industry” by Michael Curtin and Jane Shattuc, we are introduced to a common practice employed by television networks in the 1940’s to the late 1970’s that was called Least Offensive Programing (LOP). Curtin and Shattuc define LOP as being the “reasoning that mass audiences could only be built by avoiding content that might drive away particular groups of viewers.” The practice of this method in the 1940’s juxtaposed Akil and UPN’s conventional practice of specifically targeting a certain group of people speaks ostensibly to a dramatic shift in methods of achieving ratings. By creating hit television shows with the sole purpose of improving representation of a certain group and dismantling degrading stereotypes while normalizing the layered aspects of their everyday lives, Akil practically dispels the notion of LOP. In this way she proves that high ratings can be reached even with a strong appeal to a niche audience.
As far as Akil’s directing techniques, she is known for altering the pace of each scene based on the particular subject matter being discussed by the characters. For instance, if she incorporates a comedic moment in her script, this moment is accompanied by faster-paced dialogue, quick camera shifts and an overall lighthearted energy amongst the characters. Whereas, during moments of discussion of arduously controversial topics and formidable issues, she employs long dramatic pauses and slower dialogue, focusing more so on the character’s emotional exertions to formulate a climactic aurora within the scene. Typically, Akil’s directing techniques remain consistent across all of her shows, as they all feature slower nonaggressive cuts and a series of close up shots that focus on the characters’ physiognomic emotional expression. Akil’s shows all share the commonality of her directing style that relies heavily on the raw intensity of her character’s acting range, as she rarely places excessive emphasis on camera work or editing to communicate her message.
Over the course of her career, Mara Brock Akil has had the opportunity to employ the aforementioned strategic directing skills in all of her various projects. She has been the showrunner of not one, but four hit television series, including: Girlfriends (2000-2008), The Game (2006-2015), Love Is (2018) and Being Mary Jane (2013-2019). Grouping these series by genre, Girlfriends and The Game are classified as sitcoms, while Love Is and Being Mary Jane are both drama series, showcasing Akil’s seamless oscillation between the two worlds. Akil utilizes each of these two genres to both differentiate and fuse the conventions associated with black love and those associated with black success in today’s society. For instance, in Akil’s sitcoms, Girlfriends and The Game, she takes small elements of the black experience and makes them the focus of the entire show to represent a larger nuance regarding the African-American community as a whole. This strategy is evident in the creation of Girlfriends, in which Akil centered the entire premise of the show around the close-knit bond of four black “Girlfriends,” a colloquial term coined by the black community to signify a “best friend” who also happens to be a female. With this small element of the African-American community at the forefront of the series, Akil is able to feed off of this premise in order to innovate in terms of the conventions of the show; an unbreakable friendship being the heart of the show’s content. She uses both the comedic and dramatic aspects of situation comedy to introduce a new kind of narrative; portraying a stereotypically “divided” ethnic group as irrevocably united no matter what problems may arise.
Accordingly, Akil also uses the mere love of football to sculpt her show, The Game, into a dichotomy between the game of football itself, and the game of life from the perspective of four dynamic black characters as they try to successfully navigate through both. This series takes the situation comedy drama to another level, fueling Akil’s creative vision to combine a storyline centered around black love with one centered around black success, in order to explore what happens at their intersection. Similar to her strategy of feeding her creative vision by way of situation comedy, Akil employs this method in terms of the drama series genre. Both Being Mary Jane and Love Is converge the topics of gender, success, and romance in the black community by analyzing the issues that arise when two incredibly successful, independent, and single black women enter the dating world. Her goal with these series was to amalgamate all of the aforementioned elements to normalize and “celebrate the humanity of black love,” while conveying to her audience that “there is not one definition of love,” as she stated in two different 2018 interviews with Variety. In this way, Akil succinctly propagated two shows that both work to dismantle stereotypically subjugating gender norms and combine the corporate world with the romantic, all through the unique lens of two black females.
It is evident that Akil’s creation of Girlfriends is to thank for her success in the industry. It was during the time of her work on this show that she gained her official title as showrunner and thus, it is only appropriate to further analyze this particular series. CBS television distribution sought to highlight Girlfriends’ diverse premise while also capitalizing on its relatability to all women by officially describing the show as: “Four African-American women from different walks of like find themselves exploring the many trials and tribulations that most women face today. They go through relationships, family, friends, and other hot-topics that interest universal women.” Girlfriends truly set the foundation for Akil’s proceeding projects. Its provocative evaluation of the experience of four African-American women, showcasing them in positions of power while simultaneously exploring their vulnerabilities, ultimately working to humanize societies’ perception of black women overall, makes this series an embodiment of a “typical” creation of Mara Brock Akil. These elements of Girlfriends can be identified in all of Akil’s shows, reiterating her specific brand and target audience as a showrunner.
In terms of how Girlfriends fits in with the type of distribution it received, it is important to examine some major changes that the United Paramount Network (UPN) underwent during this time period. On January 24, 2006, UPN’s parent organization, CBS Corporation and Time Warner, officially shut down the UPN and The WB, launching a new broadcast company that would merge the two together entitled, The CW. Since Girlfriends, which aired from 2000-2008, was created under the black sitcom umbrella of the UPN, having received substantially high ratings and positive reviews, it took on the pressure of functioning just as well under The CW’s new platform. Fortunately, the network’s programming lineup was originally intended to appeal to mainly women aged 18-34, as it commemorated its formal debut with the two-hour premiere of the seventh cycle of America’s Next Top Model. Therefore, Girlfriends’ premise perfectly aligned with the network’s target audience and thus its vision as a whole, becoming a perfect fit for its distribution.
Ten years after the finale of Girlfriends aired in 2008, in an interview with Shadow and Act, Akil finally discussed what countless faithful Girlfriends fans had been waiting anxiously to hear for a decade: updates on a potential Girlfriends movie. To much of her awaiting fans’ satisfaction, Akil confirmed that she had already in fact written the script for the film. However, when asked questions regarding the release of this nominal film and about the details of the storyline, Akil responded, “I think it’s a timing thing and also the legal stuff. When you sell a script, you don’t actually own it anymore so whatever CBS and Paramount want to do,” she goes on to add, “it deserves somebody to see the value in it and write that check. That’s what it’s about. People often think I have the power. Well, I have a lot of creative input, I know the vision of it, but I need the money.” Akil’s brief delineation of the next steps to solidifying a potential Girlfriends film, considerably relates to Kirkpatrick’s explanation of content acquisition specifically in terms of how new content is acquired, discussed in Chapter 3 of his book. Kirkpatrick explores the multiple ways in which acquisition executives come across new content, one being by utilizing the producer’s representatives. In this process, the producer’s representatives are defined as being well connected individuals who serve as a great way for unsolicited projects to be professionally placed in front of potential buyers. In Akil’s case, since she sold the screenplay to the network, she no longer has any legal control over it, which is why she suggests that the next step is for someone to come along, find great value in its premise, and market it, i.e. a producer. From there, the producer will be able to beseech and convince any potential buyers of the importance of financially supporting a Girlfriends movie. Thereby reiterating Akil’s description of the awaiting path of her screenplay: its development must be driven by someone’s passion to retell the experiences and lifestyles of these four black women through the medium of a major motion picture.
One of the critical receptions of the series Girlfriends was the fact that many members of the male audience assumed that this show, because of its focus on women, was going to represent men in a negative light. However, that was exactly the opposite of Akil’s portrayal of men in the show and her male viewers were indeed surprised. As Girlfriends’ ratings began to top the charts, it was evident that the viewers were not disappointed in this unique take on situation comedy; especially viewers of color. Akil definitely received a stamp of approval from the women of color that finally felt accurately represented on television. Girlfriends has often even been referred to as the black Sex and The City. The only major critical audience reception of the series sparked during its abrupt season eight ending. A 2008 Variety article entitled, “Girlfriends: Mara Brock Akil Takes the High Road,” described the “uproar” and “bitter response” from fans after the announcement that there would be no proper series finale, “just over and out.” As fans aggressively created online petitions to end the shows eight year run with a finale, Akil chose to “accentuate the positive.” The high road that Akil chose to take was beautifully inflected through her response, “though it’s always difficult to say goodbye, I choose to focus my energy on the history that ‘Girlfriends’ has made, the human stories that we told, the beautifully complex images that we projected and the blessings 172 episodes bestowed on us, both personally and professionally.” In the midst of the audiences’ upheaval, Akil remained proud of the impact that Girlfriends had for eight long years, as its legacy ultimately pointed back to her passion for being a mirror to reflect real life experiences while increasing representation on television to ensure that no one feels invisible.
When analyzing how Akil’s series Girlfriends, an African-American sitcom, fits into the genres we’ve studied in class, it is hard to compare it to a concrete example because as of now, we have yet to study African-American sitcoms. However, I think that some aspects of Girlfriends can be compared to the show we watched in class entitled Six Feet Under which is an American drama series. Similar to Six Feet Under, within each episode, Girlfriends seamlessly weaves in and out of comedic quips and serious issues, causing the audience to undergo a balancing act of emotions. For example, in Six Feet Under, one moment a character will grieve the loss of their father, while in the next scene the audience is presented with playfully humorous sibling banter. Similarly, in Girlfriends, Akil will incorporate comedic dialogue between the four best friends and juxtapose these moments with dramatic scenes about divorce and breakups. Thus, both series genres allow for a wide range of emotional content within the context of each episode.
There is no doubt that Mara Brock Akil’s extensive career as a showrunner has earned her the rightful title as one of the many trailblazers of this generation. Through the art of storytelling, she has played a role in reclaiming the voice of the black community, who had been underrepresented in this industry for so long. She has worked tirelessly to create content that eradicates minorities from feeling “invisible to society” and to rewrite the stereotypical narrative often depicted of marginalized groups. As she continues to forge this new path of diversified television, she not only forever leaves her personalized mark on the profession of screenplay writing, but she also makes room for others to do the same.
References
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